A Meditation on the Third Collect for Mission from Morning Prayer.

The Rev. Paul D. Allick, St. George’s Episcopal Church, April 2, 2010

There are so many collects in the Book of Common Prayer that strike a deep cord with me. One of them is from Morning Prayer. It is one of the collects for mission recited at the end of the Office. It was composed by the Right Reverend Charles Henry Brent, bishop of the Philippines and Western New York. He entered his glory on March 27, 1929. Before that he was a missionary bishop and leader in the efforts to bring about unity among Christian denominations and communions. He spent his life working to bring all people together under the cross of Christ.

Let us pray the collect: Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the Cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace: So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching forth our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you; for the honor of your Name. Amen. (BCP, p.101)

This collect is unique in that it is one of the few that addresses Jesus directly. Most of our collects are addressed to God in the name of Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.

In this collect we acknowledge, directly, to Jesus Christ what it was that he endured on the cross. He stretched out his arms of love on the cold, chaffing, hard wood of the Cross. There on the Cross the comforting hands, the very touch of our Savior, were forced against the hard wood of death. There our Savior’s love was pierced with the brutality of humanity.

Christ stretched his entire being to die there. Christ did not have to die. Jesus reminds us in the Gospel according to John (10:18) that he lays down his life on his own accord, “…I have the power to lay it down, and I have the power to take it up again.” He died to heal the death that each of us will face.

Humanity did not have to die either. We choose to die: in the Garden of Eden eating from the Tree of Knowledge, in the Wilderness with our Golden Calf, in our countless rejections of God and his eternal Goodness. Christ chose to die with us in order to conquer death once for all. We choose to die and, yet, Christ chooses to give us life.

This symbol of death and defeat then becomes a symbol of new life and a surrender to God’s will. This is the paradox of God in Christ that keeps leading us forward into the mystery of our salvation: in order to live we must die. We must die to ourselves, to our wills. We must  stop living for our own desires and hang-ups and start living for something larger. We must begin to live for God and each other. In this way we begin to understand our mission: reconciliation.

This is what Bishop Brent is teaching us in this collect: under the glorious cross of Christ we are now called into mission. We ask Jesus to clothe us in his Spirit so that we can reach out our hands in love to bring others to the knowledge and love of him.

The Spirit we are clothed in is a spirit of selflessness; a spirit of gentleness; a spirit of unconditional respect and honoring of the other. We are clothed in this spirit in our baptism. As this spirit becomes our clothing we begin to know nothing else except to reach out to a world which stands trembling before the prospect of eternal death.

Our hands of love are the hands that reach out to give the good news, the Gospel: you can find peace, you no longer need to fear death. We proclaim that by his death and resurrection Christ has given us the pathway through our fears and anger.

And as much as we no longer need to fear death, we no longer need to fear life. Death and Life are now one in Christ. Death no longer has dominion over our living. We are free to choose and to give. We are free to live abundantly. We are free again to live as if we were eternal, because we are eternal.

Our mission is to be of the New Covenant which is the ministry of reconciliation. It is our mission given from the Cross to be catholic: to proclaim the whole Faith to all people, to the end of time. It is our mission from the Cross to be apostolic: sent to carry out Christ’s mission to all people (BCP, Catechism pp. 854-855).

We can also take this mission deep within ourselves. Daily we are called to pick up our cross: our fears, anxieties and resentments. We pray to God in the Morning Prayer Collect for Fridays (BCP, p.99), “…mercifully grant that we walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other that the way of life and peace…” We take the pain (cross) of our life and die to it with Christ and in that dying we find the resurrection awaiting us. In that daily process we find our joy, our life and peace.

We continue on in our every day existence to look toward Jesus on the Cross. In that Cross we do not see death but we see the conquering of death. In the Letter to the Hebrews we learn that as we run this race set before us we are always called to be, “looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross…” (12:1-2)